When I think of my Uncle Jim, I often remember him as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Jim Mathews, who died earlier this summer at age 77, loved to perform in community theater productions near his home in San Mateo. He sang in many shows and took on many roles, but his signature was playing the former president in the musical Annie, that classic Depression story about an orphan girl taken in by a rich capitalist, Daddy Warbucks.

Late in the show, Annie and Daddy Warbucks go to the White House, where FDR is considering a new program of social supports for struggling Americans. “I want to feed them and house them and pay them. Not much, but enough to send home to their parents,” Jim, as the president, would declare.

Through the song “Tomorrow,” Annie convinces FDR to go forward with this New Deal. Then, in the best moment of Jim’s performance, he would rise and start a solo.

When I’m stuck with a day

That’s gray, and lonely.

 I just stick out my chin and grin, and say…

Then he’d pause, turn to the audience and add, “Now sing with me! Republicans too!”

I share this memory with you now because so many of us are stuck in gray days. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, even here in friendly, bright California. The world’s awfulness often stops us in our tracks.

Jim had more than his share of gray days. He was injured at birth, and his parents (my grandparents) were told he never would walk (he did, with a pronounced prancing style, after a lot of therapy). He never married or had children (though his niece and two nephews, including me, treasured him as a quasi-parental figure). He never achieved any particular renown (though I’m trying with this column).

Far too often in the Golden State, and especially in Silicon Valley, where Jim spent almost all his life, the conventional wisdom is that you need a big and well-known technology, with venture funding and a giant brain, to shape the future. Jim’s example puts the lie to that thinking. He had a wonderful life, in a Frank-Capraesque way. Because he understood that life and technology, a subject he made a career teaching, are built out of small things. So are better tomorrows.

James Mathews was born in 1946 in Long Beach, one of Southern California’s bigger cities. His parents—a civilian U.S. Navy employee and a teacher—moved him to San Mateo when he was in elementary school.

San Mateo is a smaller city, of 100,000, but whenever I visited him there—which was often—he made the place seem grand. Wherever you went with him became enchanted. The little train and the big trees in Central Park. The playgrounds and fields at Hillsdale High and Laurel Elementary. The little branch libraries. His beloved College Heights Church, a highly democratic and informal place where almost every member of the congregation, adult and child, would talk during the service.

The church sat atop a windswept hill, with bay views so glorious that I sometimes wondered: Who needs heaven?

Jim’s magic was that he paid attention to little things. “Don’t step on those—they’re California poppies,” he once advised. “Those are the state flower!” And he engaged with everyone, even people who were scary. At Hillsdale High, Jim was no jock, and the 25-year-old football coach had intimidating intensity.  But instead of backing away, Jim volunteered to be the team manager and learned lasting lessons about teamwork from that coach, the future Super Bowl winner Dick Vermeil.

If you thought like Jim, everything seemed like an opportunity. Jim, who graduated from San Francisco State, eventually got a low-profile job at the College of San Mateo, a community college. Over 21 years, he and his colleagues found ways to add the best new computers and technology, ultimately creating a dynamic media lab. From there, he went to Baywood Elementary, where he created not one but two tech labs. He designed them to teach not just students, but teachers and parents. Jim insisted that students fix the computers themselves.

“Grandpa Geek,” they called him.

Technology, Jim would say, was not this big force to be feared or celebrated. Technology was really just a lot of little things, and the fun was to be had in tinkering, and figuring out how to use them together.

Speaking of fun, the most fun I ever had in my life was when Uncle Jim would visit Southern California and take my brother and me to Disneyland. I’d gone to Disneyland with other relatives, but it was boring—you’d wait in long lines for the biggest rides. But Jim took us to everything and emphasized the little treasures: the Enchanted Tiki Room, the rock formations on Tom Sawyer Island, the real-world potential of the automated People Mover in Tomorrowland, which he considered the best land. (He was right about the People Mover—they are installing a new one at LAX now.)

The little things that mattered most to Jim were charity. He looked for ways to help. He donated to the people at the door. And to the people who called on the phone. I once asked Jim if he was a soft touch. His answer: What’s wrong with being a soft touch?

Jim didn’t like it when people tried to take care of him, but he loved to help take care of other people.

Eight years ago, Jim, feeling a bit lonely after retiring and moving back into his deceased parents’ home, heard at church about a woman and her two young sons who were unhoused and needed a place to stay. He invited them to move in with him. They stayed for five years. He didn’t see it as an act of generosity. He was benefiting from this “house sharing,” from the companionship and help of his roommates.

Once, when I had dinner with all of them, Jim said he felt like a fool—for not having shared his home with people in similar circumstances many years earlier.

But Jim didn’t dwell on regrets. He was determined not to get bogged down with today’s problems. Because a new opportunity to help someone else will always present itself. And soon. Maybe even tomorrow, which is only a day away.

The post My Late Uncle Jim’s Life of Tomorrows appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I asked my new friend what she felt about all this. She said she was grateful to have the “circle closed” and that she, too, had always loved him. Indeed, he was the only man she ever truly loved.

I’ve told the story to multiple people since then—I, too, needed to get it off my chest!—and everyone has a different reaction. Some see it as wholly tragic. Others see it as beautiful. Still, some consider the college boyfriend a huge jerk for reaching out three decades later with no intentions of starting a relationship. I, on the other hand, take it as a poignant parable on the unexpected ways our lives can be affirmed and uplifted from even the most unexpected of sources.

Think about all the people who manage to “get to us” in life, and not just in the romantic sense. Don’t you wonder why certain words and gestures can resonate more than others and continue to move us years later?

Last week, while taking a morning walk through the University of California, Berkeley, my stomping grounds three decades ago, I found myself missing a burly Italian-born gentleman who ran the café I frequented just about every night of my undergraduate career. Elio De Pisa wasn’t my friend in any conventional sense. He didn’t know my mother’s name or the story of my grandfather. If asked, he couldn’t have rattled off my favorite movies. But the little he did know about me, he acknowledged and vocally embraced.

I’ve never been the most socially adept person, and I was even less so in college. The everyday rituals of dating were never really an option for a kid as quirky and shy as I was. Nor, given my (literally) medieval intellectual interests, did I know exactly to which group I belonged. To wit, I was a born and bred agnostic who was drawn to early Christian philosophy.

Whenever I came in for my daily coffee and conversation at Berkeley’s Caffe Mediterraneum, Elio would mock me lovingly for studying religion. “Gregorio Agustín de Salamanca!” he would call out whenever he saw me. (He knew and seemed to be amused by the fact that Augustine was my favorite saint.) The one time I was stupid enough to meet a young woman in that geriatric café, he told her not to trust me because I was a Jesuit. “With Jesuits you always have to read between the lines!” he bellowed.

Looking back, I realize that more often than not it has been relative strangers like Elio who could make me feel, despite all my self-doubts, that I belonged just by being myself.

In his Philadelphia homily, Pope Francis insisted that, “like happiness, holiness is always tied to little gestures.” He talked about the “the little miracles” that are quietly shared within loving families, those gestures “of tenderness, affection, and compassion” that “make us feel at home.”

But what he didn’t touch on was the way non-family members—colleagues, bosses, acquaintances, shopkeepers, café managers, and even strangers—can also bestow upon us little miraculous gestures that can lighten our load, give us confidence, and ultimately make us feel a little more at home in the world.

Last November, I gave a brief, frenzied, slightly nutty talk at the Getty Museum at a symposium that had been organized around the work of Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, an artist whose stark depictions of exile and alienation I’ve admired since college.

After my talk, Koudelka, whom I had never met, came up to me, repeatedly stuck his finger in my chest and asserted rather aggressively in his broken English, “You are who you are supposed to be. Some people will hate you. Some people will love you. I love you.”

I have no other way to describe that odd little moment other than as a tremendous gift, the memory of which somehow helps me understand my small place in the world.

It makes me think that the email my Hawaiian friend received from her long lost love was less a romantic gesture than it was a profound acknowledgement that a man whose affections she had once craved thought she was special, a feeling he deprived her of when he broke her heart so long ago. It was a particularly welcome acknowledgment, I assume, after her recent divorce.

We cannot live on gestures alone. But in a world that allows us to move faster and farther from home than ever before, it’s important to realize that it may very well be the kindness of strangers that helps keep us going.

The post The Everyday Miraculous Gestures That Pope Francis Did Not Mention appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.